Stephen Breyer Thinks the Supreme Court Is Doing It Wrong

Kevin Barry embarkedon “Finistère” while he was making the same ferry trip, from Ireland to France, that he describes in the story. As he explains in an accompanying interview, a safe arrival was not necessarily guaranteed: “I always think I know how to write a short story until I start a new one, and then the meltdown begins. But, of course, the journey offered a clear narrative shape, as all journeys do.” In this fictional voyage, a fifty-five-year-old man, who is escaping a doomed romance in County Clare, finds himself engaged in conversation by a teen-age girl in the ferry’s café, and the pair bond over their shared anticipation of the new series of Netflix’s “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons.” The ensuing discussion is often very funny, but a more serious undercurrent runs beneath the humor as both the man and the girl consider how to navigate emotions that cannot always be controlled.

—Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor